DATE: February 8, 2017
TIME: 10:30am PT, 1:30pm ET

The utility of animal models in drug development is limited, in part, by the measures available to researchers for monitoring animals. In life measures are often subjective, lack clinical relevance and can be hard to reproduce.  Conventional approaches to collecting in-life measures are labor-intensive and may introduce experimental variability, as they require frequent handling of the animals during the course of the study.  Vium’s technology platform addresses these essential problems by continuously collecting physiologically relevant data, providing researchers greater insights and consistency for in vivo studies.
 
We present Vium’s Digital Vivarium, which combines HD video cameras and digital sensors with computer vision and machine learning to enable automatic, continuous assessment of disease progression for study animals simultaneously in the home cage.  The system measures physiologic, behavioral, environmental, husbandry-related, and disease-specific parameters.  Within specific animal models, novel metrics are identified that track disease severity and efficacy of reference compounds automatically and objectively.
 
We have applied this method across a spectrum of disease models.  This presentation will show how novel Vium metrics can be used to assess disease in a model of lung injury and in the MRL/lpr model of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus. The result is a new paradigm for profiling the safety and efficacy of pharmacological agents that is not limited in scale and throughput by individual technicians.
 
Learning Objectives:

• Describe the Vium Platform and demonstrate how novel insights can be derived from non-invasive digital metrics in preclinical rodent studies
• Continuous digital readouts of physiologic parameters provide reproducible, previously unattainable tracking of disease in Lupus and Lung Injury models as examples.